"Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer." - Simone Weil
What did you stay up too late thinking about?
Menocchio, the sixteenth-century miller from Friuli who read a handful of books badly and built a whole cosmology out of cheese and worms. The question that started the night was why Borges loved Cervantes, and it ended with me certain Borges would have loved Menocchio more–he couldn’t have invented a better character. Then, the recursion set in. What would Menocchio have made of a story about Borges reading Menocchio? What would Borges have made of Menocchio reading Borges reading Menocchio? Misreading is the generative part; that’s what the miller knew, and what Borges built a career on. I lay in bed laughing about this, alone, until nearly two in the morning. My alarm was set for seven.
What are you preparing for?
August, mostly. I start teaching French in the fall, and a school year is 180 lesson plans; I want every one of them chosen on purpose–no PowerPoint unless the lesson needs a PowerPoint, no worksheet pulled off the internet in someone else’s voice. I registered for an AP institute this summer, and I’m building a café activity for the teen center where I volunteer–four stations: Paris, Montréal, Dakar, Tunis, and students have to order in a language they barely know. The point is that French isn’t France. The other point, the one I won’t say out loud to them, is that everyone has a comfort zone they can’t see until something pushes them past its edge. And underneath all of it: my fiancée and I are getting married this summer. Everything else on this page is what I do while I wait.
What is the institution teaching you?
I wrote on the about page that institutions are alive. This spring, I’ve been learning what that means from the inside. An institution is an organism, and what kills one isn’t turnover–every cell in a body can be replaced and the body goes on living. It dies when the system connecting the cells fails, and then it’s dead even while individual organs keep working. What follows from this is less comfortable: institutional memory is the soul of the thing, and memory only survives in writing. Spoken knowledge can be revised, denied, or simply lost the day one person retires. The written record is the only continuity an institution actually has.
What are you building or fixing?
Building: this site, slowly–pages that have been stubs since April are getting their first real prose. Two essays in first draft, one on Piranesi and one on Gilead, which turn out to be the same thing: what attention costs, and what it gives back. And a comparative dataset on township government in Chicago’s south suburbs, because I went looking for the scholarly literature on townships and found there mostly isn’t any–political science skipped it, history skipped it, and a form of government older than the state of Illinois sits essentially unstudied. Fixing: the engine. My analytical motor has no off switch; it runs until the fuel is gone or something drags it away, and–when it has no real problem to work on–it invents one. I’m trying to teach it to idle.
What surprised you?
That the best day of the month was the one I didn’t want. My mother wanted to kayak on Memorial Day; I find kayaking slow, and I went because she loves it. Paddling up the Des Plaines, I watched a snake cross the water ahead of me, deer standing in a clearing, a turtle on a log doing exactly what I was doing–sitting in the sun. I pulled small shells off the riverbed and wondered what had lived in them. The way back downstream needed almost no paddling, and for a long stretch I thought about nearly nothing, which has no precedent this year. Somewhere on the water, I felt I understood the difference between attention and grasping: a thought can roll past without being caught, and it isn’t lost. Or, if it is lost, that’s fine, too. The river didn’t need me to have ideas about it.